The Quietus Albums of the Year 2025 (In Association with Norman Records)

A hint of 1970s folk-rock becomes the dominant mode with The Making, Lavinia Blackwall’s second album under her own name since the end of her previous group Trembling Bells. A fine group they were too: wiggy, woolly, spontaneous, at least a little Incredible String Band-y… all things The Making is essentially not. This is a Top Of The Pops, verse-chorus-verse version of 70s folk, and it’s an absolute delight. Blackwall is much more evidently the bandleader here than either she or co-vocalist Alex Neilson were in Trembling Bells, but this is enough of a collaborative collection for the term ‘solo album’ to feel a misnomer. ‘Scarlett Fever’ is mostly just her vocals and piano, something like Maddy Prior with Kate Bush’s airs and graces, but there’s some flute from Laura J Martin in there too – and its lyrics were, one reads, written by Blackwall’s old history teacher.

Los Thuthanaka is the self-titled debut of sibling duo Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton. It’s defiantly unmastered and deeply psychedelic. A trance record in the true sense, it’s rooted in the rhythms of cumbia, the steps of the Andean dance huayño. Listening through, you’re left with a sense of slack-jawed euphoria. ‘Q’iwanakax-Qiwsanakax Utjxiwa’ (or to use its English language translation, ‘The Queer-People Medicines Are Here’) is pure shambling bliss, all mirror shard guitar and synths that sigh like daybreak. ‘Jallalla Ayllu Pahaza Marka Qalaqutu Pakaxa’ is a muffled fireside rave, soaked up by inhabitants of the soil.

In an instructive contrast with the wailing banshee image on the front of 2021 album I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES, the cover for Only Dust Remains shows Backxwash sat, hands folded in her lap, in a white smock or, perhaps, a baptismal robe. It’s a symbolic death to the old self in order to be reborn echoing in her fight for identity. Only Dust Remains impressively explores more varied and melodic production than past releases, balancing light with the darkness and losing none of her work’s raw emotional punch. There may or may not be relief here but the all-consuming rage has become sorrow and even hope. Holding onto the all caps styling, ‘DISSOCIATION’ features a lovely buoyant loop and Chloe Hotline’s outro chorus: “And I start to feel like I’m past this road, and I’m starting to feel like I’m back in control.”

‘The Pressure’, the opening cut on Through The World Like An Open Razor, crashes in without any hesitation with 80s coded, dark synth riffs coursing through the veins of the track. An undecipherable vocal adds more groove to an already rhythmic track before the vocal is seemingly transformed into screeches and hails similar to that of a seagull – marking the true start of a descent into absurdity. By ‘Cede’, the auditory journey is stripped back down to the simplicity of pounding techno drums, before industrial crunches and stabs of sub bass are lathered all over the song. The album’s title track similarly reflects band member Mike Bourne’s ability to produce a club tune, as swelling synth pads rise through marching kick drums, as if soundtracking a drug-induced scene in a Gaspar Noé film.

Avant-garde yet familiar, Friend echoes its influences without losing originality, offering a sense of familiarity in what could otherwise be an overwhelming first listen. ‘Hypersoft Lovejinx Junkdream’ evokes Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd with an addition of liquid drum & bass and heavily reverbed guitars, while ‘N’Balmed’ channels trip hop, recalling Beth Gibbons, both solo and with Portishead. For an album titled Friend, it carries loneliness and space in its melancholy. So, when, on the closing track, ‘Collapse (falling forward blissfully all the time)’, james K sings: “Running in circles, I topple the way, but I’m fine”, we have a perfect summation of an album that truly feels like a companion. Repeatedly there for you.

45 Pounds is 20 minutes long – indicative of just how ruthlessly YHWH Nailgun have trimmed the fat on their lithe, wiry debut LP. Like a straw-weight boxer, though light on its feet, it packs maximum intensity into its flurry of jabs and hooks, ferocious jackhammer drums providing frantic backing for deranged howls and blowtorch guitars. It is a dark and punishing experience, and yet every now and then comes a burst of light that feels all the brighter for the juxtaposition, a soaring ascent upwards on the back of a transcendent blast of synths.

In the moment of listening, Sublux are the greatest hardcore punk band in the world and Disorder In The Machinery by Sublux is the greatest hardcore punk release in the world. Perhaps you think this an implausible statement, about a group who have not released anything prior to this seven-song tape and played but a handful of London support gigs, or think I am engaging in hyperbole for cynical reasons. Be assured I am motivated only by love and seek to translate into prose the deathless excitement I felt on first hearing this EP.

Hesse Kassel take their cues from the breadth of the post rock and post hardcore arcana while fashioning their own niche explosive execution. Throughout, you can hear echoes of the heavenbound crescendos of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, skeletal sketches of Spiderland, and the scorched earth firestorms of Swans, but, of course, it is what the group do with these references that really enthrals. Hesse Kassel gleefully stitch multiple disparate segments into one cohesive whole, whilst boasting a sublime mastery of tension and release, and the wild-eyed ambition of youth that makes it all seem so effortless. So, little more than two years after their formation, they are already the complete package, a real force of nature.

There’s a charming lack of cynicism to Manic Street Preachers’ latest album, Critical Thinking. Despite concerning themselves explicitly with hyper-capitalism, managed decline and political unrest, James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire and Sean Moore can’t help but turn out something that sounds, well, optimistic. But this is the charged, gimlet-eyed optimism of the soapbox speaker: things are bad but they can get better, so you’d better listen in. With each decisive chord change and stadium-sized melody, the Welsh trio render ideas you’d usually find in a political pamphlet or outraged tweet into slogans that could be graffitied in five-foot tall letters on an overpass. 

In 1939, among the treasures unearthed from the Sutton Hoo ship burial were fragments of a 7th century lyre, thought to have belonged to an Anglo-Saxon king. Now, albeit via a replica, that instrument has found its way into the hands of one of Britain’s foremost explorers of the intersection between early and experimental musics, Laura Cannell. On LYRELYRELYRE, the instrument’s chimes are interwoven with bass recorders and double reeded crumhorn, as well as with Cannell’s deep research into the lyre’s role in pre-Christian England, to form something totally mesmeric. As Cannell herself has noted, of all the artefacts unearthed in Sutton Hoo and beyond, it’s the lyre’s unique ability to stimulate our aural senses that makes it that much more visceral as a link back to the past. “A physicality and a sound, a language and a feeling that enables us to truly feel connected to our predecessors when we strike the strings,” as she puts it. Indeed, listening to the chasmic reverberations on LYRELYRELYRE, it’s easy to imagine them echoing all the way back to the seventh century and beyond.

Perverts feels like a challenge to the large audience Ethel Cain amassed with 2022 debut studio album Preacher’s Daughter. Intended as a standalone release rather than a true follow-up album, Perverts is a nine-track EP of experimental drone, ambient and slowcore. Interested in mood and texture over traditional pop song structures, it unfolds patiently, with protracted periods of borderline silence, over the course of an hour-and-a-half. It’s a boundary-pushing work that, depending on the listener, could be considered either powerfully engrossing or deeply alienating.

About Ghosts is a masterclass in orchestration and pacing. Mary Halvorson perfectly balances all-out ensemble passages with quieter, more stripped-back moments. ‘Eventidal’ is a case in point, with its beautiful and affecting guitar and vibraphone intro, that leads into perfectly-judged melancholic, but warm, brass passages that ooze their way into the mix. ‘Amaranthine’ provides a standout moment with its tense opening that combines marching snare drum, bright horn fanfares, vibes and some particularly oddball guitar work from Halvorson. The tension breaks satisfyingly with the brass section picking out a beautifully wandering lead melody.

Opener ‘The Voice I’ve Yet To Understand’ is the clearest exploration of A Separation From Habit’s central tenet – how the discomfort of the present finds tragic echoes through time. Here, traditional zajal poetry evokes the communal past, archival radio debates from the 1970s and 80s summon living memory, while Joy Moughanni’s unsettling production places us firmly in the present. On a later interlude, we hear the sounds of real bombs dropped during Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon in 1978, while ‘Of Colour And Significance’ elicits the region’s even older colonial scars via the use of a French cassette called Lebanon In Colour. That original tape had featured romanticised melodies played on the qanun (a Middle Eastern string instrument), which here Moughanni stretches and warps into something simmering with rage. It ends, however, in a place that is, in a way, even more heartbreaking – the 14-minute ambient sprawl ‘To Lose A Friend / A Separation From Habit’ evoking the detachment and suppression necessary to simply keep existing under such conditions.

Belarus is not a place necessarily known for its transparency, which is why Krope feels like such an unexpected and extraordinary psychogeographic ramble around a country largely estranged from the rest of Europe. Anton Anishchanka, field recordist and composer, was pleasantly surprised when he went along to the Institute of Art History, Ethnography and Folklore in Minsk around the time of the pandemic and found he was able to access an archive of field recordings from roughly 1960 to 2005. Thanks to the ethnographer and researcher Iryna Vasilyeva, who works at the institute, Anishchanka managed to retrieve Belarusian folklore songs from various regions, forming the basis of this strangely betwitching album.

〽 features high-octane minyo and chanting from Kasai, a Japanese care worker, binman, father and hobbyist farmer who’s released a number of records now on Chinabot. It’s that chanting that brings it. The lyrics are on banal but brilliant subjects, such as the final song, which translates to ‘Piling-up Garbage Song’ and is about taking care with the bins. There’s a sense of randomness to the way sounds occur in these productions. Often a clap, shuffle or bong comes out of nowhere and settles into its own groove that is just about out of whack with most of the rest of the tune. Either that or they’re all just totally off the beat. Whatever the tactic, we are definitely off the grid here. It means the productions have this curious idiosyncratic sort of animism, where each ping, ding or shuffle seem to be coming from sentient players trying to keep up and failing. It’s wonderfully naive, a tiny bit daft, and incredibly likeable.

While the music on Skylarks is deft and undeniably beautiful, the album’s success is the result of something far more ineffable. Often bands exploring folk or folklore can tip into trite pastiche, leaning on either hey-nonny-nonny tweeness or try-hard The Wicker Man weirdness. Haress, instead, are matter-of-fact when it comes to their connection with landscape, place and folklore. It seems woven into their day-to-day rather than something donned as part of a performance, the product of a life being lived in the here and now rather than a timid exercise in nostalgia. Skylarks feels old, yes, but also incredibly alive.

Learning the provenance of this tough-sounding record alongside repeated plays reveals its dark beauty. You could, I suppose, apply Linnaean-style descriptions of the various “kinds” of noise you hear, such as doom, metal, minimalist or industrial, but that process is a purely cerebral one. Osmium works best when (to use an unlovely modern term), the music is embodied. Tuning in to its stentorian roar whilst out on a walk led to elevated states of mind: its pieces are ritualistic and impactful. The strange instruments and Rully Shabara’s unearthly vocals combine to make huge, pressing slabs of resonant noise.

80’z is like a joyously chaotic disco shift at the club, opening with ‘Tipz & Trickz’, which has bouncy, fast-flowing verses that sit atop jangly guitar lines reminiscent of the sounds of West African highlife. It flows into ‘Superchú!’, which features more of Bb Trickz’s characteristically drill vibe in its beats and rhythm. The track playfully mixes the artist’s Spanish lyricism with phrases in English to create a kind of Spanglish that both seems nonchalant and uniquely hers. We get this on ‘Not A Pretty Girl’ too, which sees Bb put her spin on Clairo’s 2017 breakout single ‘Pretty Girl’, coupling its laid-back instrumental with her brash delivery, confirming that she’s not one to be trifled with.

On one level, Chicago Underground Duo’s return on Hyperglyph simply extends the pair’s central themes, but while post-production has always been a big part of how they make music, they’ve never used the studio with such rigour. Part of the credit goes to Dave Vettraino, the house engineer for International Anthem. He worked closely with Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor in the studio à la Teo Macero, bringing a dazzling clarity to the layers of electronics and overdubbed percussion used to shape the record’s collaborative tunes. On the surface, the album opener ‘Click Song’ conveys the essence of CUD: a joyful, indelible trumpet melody redolent of Don Cherry’s innate lyricism, dancing over propulsive, skipping percussion. Yet beneath the veneer is a deceptively complex collision of two electrifying drum patterns – derived, like so much of Taylor’s playing here, from his study of traditional African grooves – while undergirding the deliberately blown-out sound of Mazurek is an insistently snaking synthetic bassline.

A lot has happened to Jim Legxacy since the 2023 release of his superb breakthrough mixtape homeless n***a pop music, as he outlines against a backdrop of buzzing synths and soaring guitar licks on ‘context’, the two-minute opener to his latest record. The past two years have seen his mother suffer two strokes, his brother experience psychosis, and, most devastatingly of all, the death of his younger sister. These events clearly colour what follows on black british music (2025), his dizzyingly brilliant debut for XL Recordings. It can be heard in the vulnerable admissions of regret over acoustic guitar on ‘issues of trust’ and the open references to grief in the Dave collaboration ‘3x’. Where black british music (2025) thrives is in Legxacy’s ability to effortlessly combine these intense moments of catharsis with both outright humour and nods to all manner of sounds from his childhood, including the titular Black British music of artists such as Wiley, J Hus and Dave. Elsewhere, standout cut ”06 wayne rooney’ is a thrillingly anthemic nod to the kind of mid-00s indie tunes you might have heard on a FIFA game soundtrack during that era.